When we differentiate, we simply offer students opportunities to think at a level appropriate to their ability - not their age nor their grade level.
I get lots of questions from overwhelmed folks who have suddenly landed in a new job in gifted ed and have had little training. "Where do I even start!?" is a very common cry. Here are three places to begin differentiating for gifted kids.
How do you handle grading within a differentiated classroom? While differentiating is certainly complex, this part is pretty simple, actually!
This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content… well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.
Get students moving, thinking, writing, and reading each others’ ideas with a Scholar’s Cafe.
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.
An easy way to spice up any lesson is to remove the god-awful samples and replace them with selections from great works of art, music, film, tv shows, and historic moments. You get the added bonus of exposing students to new ideas.
Here’s are the steps for running an inductive lesson based on Hilda Taba’s model of Concept Formation. Plus a sample lesson about the Nile River.
I love the term “Synthesize” from the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite “Synthesize Recipe” is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
One technique for finding complexity in a topic is to look for the edge cases, the outliers, the really big or small versions.
Even though he’s in the Duplo age range, my kid is simply more interested in Lego. And it’s always more effective, more respectful, and simply easier to start with a kid’s interests rather than what’s “age-appropriate.”
It’s so easy to just ask advanced students to work by themselves in a corner. But, the more advanced the kid, the more they need advanced instruction and adult guidance.
How few colors can you use to fill in a map so that no neighboring regions are the same color?
Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here’s a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.
We’re not doing a fluffy art project here. Kids are developing a realistic, made up creature that could have actually lived in a particular biome.
Discovering what is interesting and unexpected about a triangle’s angles. What twists have I unintentionally spoiled for my students over the years?
The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don’t they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?
Working with a student who is bored in math? Quickly finishing lessons? Needs something more? Here are three ways you can get started differentiating in math.
Acceleration is a cheap and simple way to differentiate for students who are ready for something more. It can mean skipping a whole grade but is more commonly accomplished through subject-specific acceleration. Lots of people have weird arguments against acceleration, but the research shows that it works (when done well).
I used to create extension menus, thinking they were an essential tool for differentiation. Overtime, I’ve changed my thinking. Here’s why.
When differentiating, it’s helpful to note where on the “spectrum of abstraction” your content lies. Then, see what happens when you move that content to be more abstract or more specific. It often unlocks lots of new opportunities for thinking.
One of the most significant barriers to differentiating for gifted learners is a misunderstanding of the purpose of grade-level standards. People see grade-level standards as a maximum. The truth is the complete opposite.
In a climate where we focus on who’s below-level, how many students are already ready for next year (and beyond)? Research from Johns Hopkins sheds light on the (truly) shocking number of above-level kids out there.
Wondering what to do with your early finishers? This is probably the wrong question!